According
to tradition, the use of chastity belts – metallic straps
locked over female genitalia with padlocks—dates back to the
time of the Crusades, when knights in- departure for the Holy Land
supposedly used them to ensure their wives' fidelity in their
absence. Recent studies, however, show that such instruments were
never in use during the Middle Ages.

There are in fact
some logical problems with the use of such belts, chief among them
hygiene: even if the belts had small holes for bathroom functions,
such devices would soon cause wounds followed by infections, serious
sepsis, and finally death. Furthermore, it is quite plausible that
before leaving the knights would sleep one last time with their
wives, maybe hoping to find a baby on their return. It is quite
obvious that a locked chastity belt would have prevented any birth.
And finally, the most obvious problem: any medieval lock could be
opened by a locksmith in a few seconds.

In addition to
such logical faults, the fact that medieval chastity belts are just a
legend is suggested by the absolute absence of such belts that can be
dated back to the Middle Ages.

Abstinence

The
idea of sexual abstinence is certainly quite old. The Latin term for
chastity belt, cingulum
castitatis,
appeared in some works by Gregory the Great, Alcuin of York, St.
Bernard of Clairvaux, and Nicolas Gorranus starting in the fifteenth
century. However, in all such cases it is meant as a symbol of moral
purity, not as a physical object.

The concept of a
fidelity pact between lovers appears in poems of the twelfth century,
such as the "Lai of Guigemar'by the famous poetess Marie de
France. In this tale, when Guigemar departs from the woman he loves,
they exchange love tokens: the woman ties a knot in his shirt that
only she can untie, while the knight ties a tight girdle around her
loins that only he knows how to untie. Thus they can become lovers
with others only if they cut off their clothes. But, as it can be
seen, this is a symbolic pact and, significantly, it is the woman who
initiates it.

In order to find
the first visual depiction of an object that vaguely resembles a
chastity belt, we need to look to a 1405 codex, Konrad Kyeser's
military encyclopedia the Bellifortis. Among descriptions of weapons,
catapults, and torture devices, an instrument that resembles armor
more than a chastity belt (figure 2) is presented as being used "unto
the women of Florence."

fact writes:
"These are hard iron breeches of Florentine women which are
closed at the front. Padlocks unto the four-legged creatures,
breeches unto the women of Florence, A joke binds this lovely series
together, I recommend them to the noble and obedient youth."
This, then, would imply that even if the device really existed in the
fifteenth century, it was certainly quite rare. Surely there are no
traces of such apparatus in the Florence of the times.

A
sixteenth-century engraving attributed to Sebald Beham, a minor
German master, shows a woman wearing a "chastity belt"
locked with a padlock, standing between two men giving her money (see
figure 1). An interpretation given for the engraving is that she is a
prostitute standing between her protector and a client. So, even if
the belt was an actual physical object rather than a metaphorical
concept, it is represented in the Beham engraving merely as a
professional instrument and not as a constriction by a jealous lover.

Fakes

The earliest known
"real" chastity belts date to around 1840 and are found
today in the museums of Europe. For example, at the Musee de Cluny in
Paris, devoted to medieval art, until recently one could find a belt
that was said to have belonged to Catherine De Medici. It was only in
1990 that the museum's curators noted that the object was most likely
a forgery from the nineteenth century. Another piece from the British
Museum in London, originally thought to date to the sixteenth
century, was recently established to be from the 1840s and removed
from the exhibition.

It
is only in the nineteenth century the
United States where Puritanism was again in vogue, that chastity
belts became widespread. However, these were more refined and were
meant to be worn for only a short time, used by working women with
the purpose of avoiding rape or imposed on adolescents in order to
prevent masturbation, which was considered bad for the health (or at
least for the soul) by the bourgeois moral hypocrisy.

The
Psychical Researcher

The
historian primarily responsible for the creation in the twentieth
century of the myth of medieval chastity belts is none other than
Eric John Dingwall, who in 1931 published his monograph The
Girdle of Chastity (still
in print today). Dingwall is quite famous in psychical research
history. He worked with both the British Society for Psychical
Research and its American counterpart. He conducted celebrated
investigations on such mediums as Eva C., Eusapia, Margery, and the
Schneider brothers. He was friends with Houdini and an accomplished
magician himself, who was not easily fooled by the deceptions that
some pseudo-psychics employed. He also contributed to the debunking
of the Borley Rectory "haunting" case. And yet he was
convinced that chastity belts really existed in the Middle Ages. "As
a monument of human folly," he wrote in his book, "the
girdle of chastity is a good example: as an indication of the lengths
to which jealousy unchecked will lead it is unique." Not so.
However, he can be excused, for in his time some of the belts on
display in museums, and whose pictures are included in Dingwall's
book, were still thought to be authentic. At that time it was
impossible to date them with accuracy.

Furthermore,
in Dingwall's defense, it can also be said that chastity belts were
actually publicized in medical journals of the early twentieth
century as a means to ensure fidelity, which helps explain how one of
the many myths attributed to the Middle Ages became reality in modern
times.